Learning a new skill can be deeply frustrating.
Whether you're trying to play your first chord on a guitar, use chopsticks, swing a golf club or simply write your name with your non-dominant hand, the experience is often the same.
You know exactly what you're trying to do, yet your body seems to have other ideas. Every movement feels awkward, clumsy and strangely unnatural.
It's tempting to assume that some people are simply born more talented than others. We often describe elite athletes, musicians and artists as "naturals," as though their brains came pre-wired with abilities the rest of us lack.
But what if that's not what's happening at all?
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tackled this question by investigating one of the oldest mysteries in neuroscience: why is your dominant hand better than your other one?
Scientists agree that most of us are born with a preference for using one hand over the other but don’t know why that preferred hand becomes so much more skilled.
Does the dominant side of the brain have a built-in advantage for controlling movement? Or does the preferred hand simply become better because it has spent decades holding pens, using tools, throwing balls and brushing teeth?
To answer that question, the researchers recruited right-handed volunteers and designed experiments where participants sat in front of a table with 5 objects in front of them.
The first experiment: Is your dominant arm simply better at controlling movement?
Experiment 1 involved participants reaching from the centre to each target using either their left or right arm. Then the same again with a 1.8 kg weight strapped to each participant's wrist.
Adding the weight made both arms less precise, but it affected them almost equally.
If the dominant side of the brain truly had a built-in advantage for controlling movement, this extra challenge should have magnified the difference between the two arms.
It didn't.
The second experiment: A lightweight stick
Next the researchers attached a long, lightweight bamboo stick to the participants' forearms and the participants had to touch each target using the tip of the stick.
This time, a dramatic difference emerged.
The dominant arm produced much smoother, more consistent trajectories, while the non-dominant arm struggled to accurately control the stick's tip.
The dominant was better because it had spent a lifetime learning how to control tools.
The third experiment: What happens when neither arm has any experience?
Finally, the researchers attached a pen to each participant's elbow and asked them to write the letter "A" and the number "8" using their elbows as the writing tool.
If the dominant side of the brain is naturally better at controlling movement, the dominant elbow should still perform better. But if skill comes from practice, neither elbow should have an advantage because neither has spent decades learning to write.
The dominant elbow showed no advantage whatsoever.
Then they created a training program where each participant trained one elbow to write with a pen, and whichever elbow was trained became significantly better at writing.
The research suggests that the brain builds skilled movement wherever sufficient practice occurs.
The researchers concluded that we're not born with one hand that is inherently more skilled. Instead, skill appears to emerge from years of experience controlling increasingly complex movements with tools and objects.
That means the frustrating awkwardness of learning something new isn't necessarily evidence that you lack talent. It may simply reflect the fact that your brain hasn't yet accumulated the thousands of repetitions needed to build those same movement programmes.
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